The bumper of the car with the New Car Smell smashed into the fire hydrant in front of Bill Landsmann’s house. Leora backed up the car, moved it forward, turned the wheel, tried again. The fire hydrant still seemed to exert a certain magnetic pull on the bumper. She had only had her license for three weeks, after months of refusing to even try to learn how to drive, after Naomi. “Shit!”

“Hello, Leora!” a voice suddenly called. Leora turned off the engine and turned around to see Bill Landsmann standing on his front lawn, hands on his hips, smiling. As he opened the car door for her, she wondered how long he had been waiting there.

“Would you like to see my yard? Let me show you the river,” he announced.

“Uh, sure,” Leora answered, bewildered. The river? Before she could ask what he meant, he was marching up the lawn, his arms curling behind the small of his back. She trailed behind him, watching the back of his white-haired head again as she followed along, like following a tour guide in another country.

In the yard behind the house was a little river. More like a sewage outlet, really, a stream that came rushing with tremendous force out of a wide pipe poking out of a nearby hill. Still, it was big enough to swim in, though probably not to drown in.

“See, the current is strong now, because of the storm last week,” Bill Landsmann announced, gesturing toward the rising waters. “I was just watching it now, while I was waiting for you. We have concerns sometimes with flooding here, because of this stream, but so far we have been lucky—for thirty years we have been lucky.” So he had lived in their town for thirty years, Leora thought, almost twice as long as she had. Yet he still seemed more of a stranger than she.

Leora blinked, suddenly seeing the two of them from the outside: an old man and a young girl standing in a yard alongside a roaring little stream. Maybe they were grandfather and granddaughter, or teacher and student? Who could tell, out of context? Bill Landsmann had paused for a moment too, beside the stream, and Leora wondered for a moment what he was thinking, or what he was seeing. Then he suddenly turned around and walked back into the house, Leora following behind him.

This time the slide show was about the Jewish community in India, which according to Bill Landsmann (and, when Leora later checked it out for herself, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica as well) had been living on the Indian subcontinent for twenty-two centuries, beginning when a group of Jewish merchants were shipwrecked near the city of Kochin. The community was documented by medieval Jewish travelers, Bill Landsmann told her, voyaging merchants who kept records of Jewish populations around the world as they traveled. Leora supposed that he saw himself as their heir.

“Who do you travel with on these trips?” she asked Bill Landsmann when he finally turned the lights back on. In all the slides he had shown her, she had never noticed any pictures of him. “With your wife?”